This glossary will help you understand the meaning of words related to SEO. So, if you are looking for a quick reference as you build your search engine optimization strategies, this is it!
10X Content: Content that is supposedly ten times better than the comparison.
200 Response: A page that has been indexed by Google and can be found in its index. The number 200 refers to how many pages there were before the web admin created the first one.
301 Redirect: 301 redirects are used when a web admin moves an old URL to a new one. It’s also known as a permanent or canonical link.
302 Moved Permanently: This is a temporary redirect from one URL to another. When users click on a 302 redirection link, they get redirected to the new location.
404 error: A 404 page appears when a website cannot find what it is looking for. For example, if you type “www.example.com/page1” into your browser address bar, then click enter, you may see a 404 error message saying “Page Not Found.”
410 page: A 410 page is a page that is no longer available because it is gone after being moved permanently.
500 Internal Server Error: An internal server error happens when something goes wrong with the server itself. This error usually means that the server cannot process requests correctly.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Accelerated mobile pages are similar to regular HTML but have special rules that make them load faster. They use less data and are easier to read.
Above the fold: The first part of a web page appears without scrolling down. It’s usually the top half of the browser window or the top half of a mobile screen. Above-the-fold content is the most important because it dramatically impacts whether people stay on your site and read more.
Absolute Link: Absolute links point directly at a file instead of using relative paths like../../../. These absolute links are useful when linking to files within directories.
Absolute Path: Absolute path is a path that starts with a / character. It’s different from a relative path, which doesn’t begin with a /.
Accessibility: Accessibility refers to making websites accessible to everyone regardless of their ability or disability. Web designers should ensure that all users can easily access and navigate their sites.
Ahrefsbot: Ahrefsbot is a bot that crawls websites and indexes them using its algorithm.
Ajax: Ajax is a way to make Web pages faster by loading only the information needed at any given moment.
Algorithm: Algorithms are used to determine which sites should be listed in the results of a search query. There are many different algorithms out there, but they all have one thing in common — they rank web pages according to their relevance to the keywords searched for.
Algorithmic Penalty: An algorithmic penalty is a penalty applied to a website based on the actions taken by other websites, such as spamming.
Alt Attribute or Alt-Text: Alt text is the HTML code that appears when clicking a link. The alt text contains information about what the link leads to.
AMP: Accelerated mobile pages are similar to regular HTML but have some special rules to make them load fast. They use less data, are easy to read and work well on small screens.
Analytics: Analytics software collects data about your website’s activity, such as visitor behavior, search terms used, and other metrics. These data points allow you to make informed decisions about your business.
Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to the visible text appearing under a hyperlink. When people click on links, they expect to go somewhere else; therefore, anchor text should describe where the link will take them.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is an area of computer science that makes computers think as humans do. Humans can apply AI to various areas, including natural language processing, image recognition, robotics, and machine learning. There are AI writing tools that help with creating content.
Article Spinning: Article spinning is a technique that uses automated programs to create articles based on existing ones. Some article spinners also include SEO features.
Article (Blog) Syndication: Blog syndication is the process of distributing your blog posts through RSS feeds. You can then share these feeds with others so they can subscribe to your blog and receive updates whenever you publish new content.
ASPX: ASP.NET is Microsoft‘s framework for building dynamic websites. It allows developers to build rich client applications for the Internet.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML: AJAX is a technology that allows users to interact with a website without having to reload every time they want to access new information. Instead, AJAX requests the server, receives the response, and displays the updated content immediately.
Attribution: Attribution is the act of attributing a source to a piece of work. For example, if you write a blog post, you must attribute
Author Byline: A snippet about the person that wrote the article
Author Rank: Author Rank is a metric that measures how much authority a person has over a topic. The higher someone ranks in this system, the more authoritative they are considered.
Authoritative: An authoritativeness score is calculated based on the number of incoming links a particular domain has. This score indicates how trustworthy the domain is.
Auto-generated Content: Auto-generated content is generated automatically from a database using scripts. Examples of auto-generated content include news stories, press releases, product descriptions, etc.
Backlink Authority: Backlinks are links pointing back to your site. A high-quality backlink comes from a trusted website. Backlinks help Google understand which sites are essential to your site’s success.
Backlink Profile: A backlink profile shows what types of sites are linking to yours. It helps you identify potential partners who may be interested in working together.
Backlinks: Backlinks are inbound links pointing back to your site. They are usually found naturally on other websites but can also be created by paid promotion.
Baidu: Baidu is China’s largest search engine. It was founded in 2000 and now ranks 1 in searches and market share.
Basic Page Structure: Basic page structure includes all HTML elements necessary to display basic content.
Below the Fold: Below the fold is the portion of a web page that appears when it first loads. After that, users typically scroll down to see the rest of the page.
Bing: Bing is Microsoft‘s search engine. It started in 2009 as MSN Search and became an entity in 2010.
Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools is designed to help web admins improve their sites’ performance in Bing.
Bingbot: A bingbot is a program that crawls the web looking for relevant results. Bingbot is used to index pages and find keywords.
Blackhat SEO: Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices used to raise search engine rankings using techniques that go against the search engine’s terms of service.
Blended Search: Rather than only displaying the webpage snippets, Google adds carousels, maps, images, maps, and so forth.
Blog: A blog is a website where users post their thoughts and ideas. Blogs are generally written in plain English and include images and videos. Users often use blogs to share personal experiences and opinions.
Blogging Platforms: A blogging platform allows web admins to store and edit their blogs. Many different platforms are available, ranging from free services like WordPress to premium solutions like Squarespace.
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit one page and leave immediately. It’s important because it tells you whether or not visitors are finding what they need.
Bot: Bots are programs designed to complete tasks on behalf of human beings automatically. Bots are commonly used to perform repetitive tasks like searching the Internet, posting comments, and sending emails.
Brand Mentions Link Building: refers to any action taken to build links to your brand name.
Brand Term: A brand term is a word or phrase that represents your business. The more times this term appears in online content, the higher your chances are of being found when someone searches for that term.
Branded Keyword: Branded keywords contain the company name, brand name, or product name. For example, if your company sells widgets, then “widget” would be a branded keyword since it includes your company name.
Breadcrumb Navigation: Breadcrumb navigation is a way of organizing information on a website so that users know exactly where they are at any given time.
Breadcrumb Trail: A breadcrumb trail list links that lead back through a site.
Bridge Match Keyword: Bridge match keywords are words or phrases that appear in the title tag and body text of a page. They can be beneficial for increasing traffic by directing searchers to specific sections of a page.
Bridge Page: Bridge Pages are pages that link between two separate domains. These pages are typically used to provide an easy transition between two different websites.
Broken Links: Broken links occur when someone clicks on a link that no longer works. Due to outdated URLs, missing files, or even server errors, broken links could happen.
Browser Error Code: Browser error codes help you identify problems with your browser. If you receive a message telling you that something isn’t working correctly, check the browser’s error code to see what the problem might be.
Cache: Cache is a temporary storage space that saves frequently accessed information so that it doesn’t need to be retrieved from the source each time it’s requested.
Cached Page: Cached pages are pages that have been saved in the cache so that they don’t need to be re-downloaded every time they’re needed.
Call To Action: Call to action are buttons or other types of calls to action that prompt visitors to take some kind of action. CTAs can be as simple as asking visitors to subscribe to email newsletters or as complex as encouraging them to make a purchase.
Canonical Tag: Canonical tags allow search engines to determine which version of a particular webpage should rank higher than others. It appears as rel=canonical.
Canonical URL: Canonical URL is a unique address for a particular page. The canonical URL is the preferred URL for most search engine algorithms, which means that Google will like using this URL over others.
Captcha: Captchas are forms that require characters to be entered before being allowed access. Captchas are used to prevent
Cascading Style Sheets: CSS is a style sheet language that allows designers to create custom styles for specific elements on a webpage.
ccTLD: ccTLD stands for country code top-level domain. The most common examples are.com,.org, and.net.
CDN: CDNs have distributed networks of servers located around the world with the primary purpose of serving static media.
Chunked Transfer-Encoding: Chunked transfer encoding splits large chunks of data into smaller pieces, making sending over slow connections easier.
Churn and Burn (SEO): Churning and burning refers to the practice of constantly changing content on a page without regard for whether or not it’s relevant to the user.
Citation: Citations are references to another website or resource within a document. When referencing another site, you can use a direct link, a description of the page, or a summary of its contents.
Click Bait: Clickbait is any piece of content on a website that is specifically designed to get people to click on it.
Click-Through Rate: A Click-Through Rate or CTR measures the percentage of visitors who click
Caffeine: Caffeine is a performance booster that speeds up the load time of a website.
Classification: Classification describes how search results are organized based on the type of content. For example, one classification system would organize news articles by date while another would group them by topic.
CMS: Content Management Systems manage websites’ content. They often include features like blogs, forums, photo galleries, etc.
Cloaking: Cloaking is hiding important text or graphics on a web page to make it appear more appealing to search engines than it is.
Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
CMS: Content Management Systems allow site owners to update and manage content without needing technical knowledge easily.
Co-Citation: Co-citation occurs when two websites reference each other in their articles. It’s similar to backlinks, except instead of linking to each other, they’re referencing each other.
Code Snippet: A snippet of HTML or JavaScript code
Code Swapping: Code swapping is when a website owner changes the source code of an article but doesn’t change the original title or meta tags. Swapping causes the new version of the article to rank higher than the old version.
Comment Spamming: Comment spamming is posting comments on a website with no value. These comments usually contain links to
Competition: Competition refers to how many competitors there are for a particular keyword.
Competitor Analysis: Competitor analysis refers to analyzing other websites to determine what they offer and how they compare to yours.
Computer-generated content: Computer-generated content is written by computers rather than humans. Examples include blogs, wikis, forums, etc.
Content: Content is everything on your website, from images to videos to text.
Content Delivery Network: CDNs store copies of websites across multiple data centers, so users don’t experience slow loading times.
Content Hub: A content hub is where you can find all the information you need about a topic. For example, if you wanted to learn more about SEO, you could go to Google and type “SEO” into the search bar. You’d then see links to different pages with helpful information about SEO.
Content Marketing: Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, relevant content that helps drive traffic to your business.
Content Silo: A content silo is a collection of related content within a single website.
Content Scraping: Content scraping is when someone takes information from a website and republishes it elsewhere.
Content Syndication: Content syndication is when one website publishes another website’s content.
Conversion: A conversion is an action taken by a visitor to your website after viewing your website. For example, if someone visits your website and fills out a contact form, this would be considered a conversion.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take some desired action after visiting your website.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Conversion rate optimization is the practice of improving the conversion rates by using various techniques such as A/B testing.
Co-occurrence: Co-occurrence is when two words occur next to one another within a document.
Convertible Traffic: Convertible traffic is traffic that will eventually become paying customers if it converts into sales.
Cookies: Cookies are small bits of text stored by the browser on the user’s computer. They’re usually used to track browsing habits.
Core vs. Non-core keywords: Core keywords are the most searched terms on Google. These are also referred to as long-tail keywords because they don’t generate as much revenue as short-term keywords.
Core Audience: The core audience is the people who visit your site every day. They are the ones you want to keep happy, so they’ll come back again.
Core Web Vitals: Core web vitals are what you should know about your website before optimizing it.
Things like page speed, mobile-friendliness, and page load time are important factors that affect how well your website performs. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a metric to measure the user experience.
Cornerstone Content: Cornerstone content is any kind of content that provides value for both readers and publishers. It’s something that everyone wins with.
Correlation: Correlation measures whether one thing happens before another. For example, if you have a list of keywords and then see those exact keywords show up in Google Analytics, you know that something is going on. When measuring SEO results, we most often look at correlation rather than cause.
Cost Per Acquisition: Cost per acquisition is the amount spent on advertising divided by the number of conversions. CPA is also known as cost per sale.
Crawl Budget: The crawl budget is the maximum number of pages indexed during a single indexing session.
Crawl Demand: The crawl demand is the total number of pages indexed over time. Crawl demand is measured in requests per second or “requests per minute.”
Crawl Rate: The crawl rate is the average number of pages indexed each day.
Crawlability: Crawlability refers to how easy or difficult bots are to access a particular URL. It’s determined by looking at the HTML code of the page. If there are many errors or broken links, it is harder for crawlers to access the page.
Crawler: Crawlers are programs that search the web for new content. They visit websites and download all the HTML code found on them.
Crawling: Crawling is the process of fetching and storing data about every page on a website.
Cross-Domain Scripting: Cross-domain scripting occurs when a malicious script runs on a different domain than the one it originated from.
Cross-Domain Tracking: Cross-domain tracking allows you to track visitors from different domains. You can use this information to improve your website.
De-indexing: De-indexing means removing a webpage from Google’s index. This removal is done manually or automatically, depending on what action you take.
Dead-End Page: A dead-end page is a page that doesn’t lead anywhere else. It has no outbound links.
Dedicated Server: Dedicated servers are powerful computers with lots of memory and storage space. They’re usually used for hosting large sites.
Deep Linking: Deep linking allows you to create hyperlinks between your website and other websites. You can link directly to specific parts of a website.
Design: Design is the visual appearance of a webpage.
Direct Traffic: Direct traffic comes directly to your site without passing through an intermediary such as a search engine.
Directory Listings: Directory listings allow people to find your site through an online directory. There are two kinds of directories: general-purpose directories and topic-specific directories.
Directory Submission: Directory submission is where you submit a website to an online directory for free.
Disallow Robots Meta Tag: The disallow robots meta tag prevents search engines from crawling certain areas of your website.
Disavow Links: Disavow links tell Google not to follow any links on a page.
Dofollow link: A dofollow link is a link that will pass PageRank to the linked page. Dofollow links are more valuable than nofollow links.
Domain Authority: Domain authority is a measurement of the quality of a website based on the popularity of its top-level domains.
Domain Name: A Domain name is a name given to a website. For example, www.google.com is the domain for Google.
Domain Rating (DR): DR is a rating provided by Moz that indicates the quality of backlinks to a website.
Doorway Page: A doorway page is a landing page designed specifically to direct users to a paid product or service.
DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo is a search engine that uses privacy-focused technology. It does not store user history.
Duplicate Content: Duplicate content occurs when multiple versions of the same page exist across various URLs. Large amounts of the same text on numerous pages can also be considered duplicate content.
Dwell Time: Dwell time is the average length of time a visitor spends on a given page.
Dynamic Content: Dynamic content is any type of content that changes over time. Examples include news articles, blogs, etc.
Dynamic Link: A dynamic link is a link that appears only after a visitor performs some action. Dynamic links are useful because they provide immediate feedback about how well a web page converts.
Dynamic URL: A dynamic URL is a URL that changes depending on what happens in the rest of the site. For example, if someone buys something from your store, they might receive a confirmation email with a unique URL. However, that URL could change after the purchase has been made.
E-A-T: E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, & Trustworthiness. These three metrics are used in Google’s Search Rater’s Quality Guidelines.
Editorial Link: An editorial link is a link that points to another page within your website. Editors often place these types of links to provide additional context to their readers.
Email Outreach: Sending email outreach is one way for web admins to get links pointing at a website. These are called backlinks.
Embedded Video: Embedding videos into your website is a great way to increase engagement. Videos embedded in your blog posts can help drive traffic to that post.
Engagement Rate: Engagement rate is the percentage of people who view a piece of content before leaving the website.
Enhanced Search: Enhanced search allows you to customize the look and feel of your SERPs. You can use it to highlight specific keywords, add custom images, create an image gallery, and much more.
Entry Page: An entry page is the first page a visitor landed on.
Error 404 Page: Error 404 pages tell visitors why they’re being redirected away from a particular page. They should explain why the page doesn’t exist and solve the problem.
Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date quickly. It’s useful because it keeps providing value long after it was published.
Exact Match Anchor Text: Exact match anchor text is a phrase that appears exactly as it does in the source code. Search engines don’t like these because they look unnatural.
Exact Match Domains: Exact match domains are those that exactly match the keywords in the title and description of your web pages.
Exact Match Keyword: An exact match keyword is a keyword that exactly matches the words in its title and description.
Extended Article: An extended article is a long-form article that contains several paragraphs of content.
External Links: External links point to outside sources like social media profiles, images, videos, etc.
Faceted Navigation: Faceted navigation allows visitors to browse through different sections of your site without having to scroll down the page. This navigation is especially helpful for large websites where there may not be enough room to fit all of the information on one page.
Favicon: Favicons are small icons next to bookmarks or browser tabs. They allow users to identify a website quickly.
Featured Snippet: Featured snippets are boxes that appear at the top of the search results when a user searches for a specific term. The featured snippet box will contain relevant information about the webpage.
Feedburner: Feedburner is a tool that helps publishers manage RSS feeds. It includes creating feed lists, managing subscribers, sharing feeds, and more.
Filter Words: Filter words are words that search engines consider too common to rank well. They include such things as “a,” “the,” “an,” “and.”
Footer Links: Footer links are links found near the bottom of each page. These are usually advertisements or other links to related sites.
Forbidden Words: Forbidden words are words that search engine algorithms believe should never show up in any kind of text. Some examples include “the,” “of,” “to,” “for,” and “in.”
Forums: Forums are online communities where members discuss topics related to a specific topic. For example, if you sell dog food, you could start a forum about dogs.
Free For All: A free for all is a link structure that gives equal weighting to every single link within a given domain.
Freshness: Freshness is how recently something has been updated. If a page hasn’t changed since last week, Google considers it fresh.
Full Content Images: Full content images display the entire page.
Full HTML Code: Full HTML code displays every element on the page, including headings, titles, paragraph tags, and even inline styles.
Full Site Crawl: Full site crawls are performed by Googlebot. They crawl every page on your site, including subpages, so that Google can index them appropriately.
Gated Content: Gated content is content that requires action such as payment from the user before they can see the full content.
Gateway Page: Gateway pages are landing pages that lead to other sites. They’re used to funnel traffic from search engines to specific pages on your site.
Google Alerts: Google alerts allow you to create custom searches based on keywords or phrases. You can then have them send you emails whenever new content is posted about those terms.
Google Answers (Answer Box): On the search engine result page, answers list what google thinks is the best answer to the query.
Google Autocomplete: The autocomplete feature on Google shows users possible completions when they start typing a word into the search box.
Google Bowling: Building harmful backlinks to hurt your competitor’s chances of ranking. Google bowling is a black hat SEO technique.
Google Business Profile: A business profile is a listing on Google Maps that includes basic information about your company.
Google Caffeine: Caffeine is a feature that helps speed up the indexing process by allowing Google to crawl more frequently.
Google Dance: In the past, when a new version of the main algorithm for Google was released, called “the dance” (or sometimes just referred to as “dance”), there would be an extended period where some websites might not show up at first because they were affected by the change. It was a time when search engine results pages were in flux.
Google Hummingbird: Google Hummingbird was a recent update to their search algorithms focused on improving relevance over keyword stuffing.
Google Index: The index is a library of pages Google had added to their database. When an article is indexed by Google, it can appear on the search engine, although it doesn’t always.
Google Instant Preview: Google instant preview is a feature that displays snippets of text from websites right next to the search bar.
Google Keyword Planner: Google keyword planner is a tool that helps you find which keywords will perform well for your site.
Google Knowledge Graph: The knowledge graph lets you explore topics related to your search term. For example, if you searched for “Apple,” this section would tell you everything you need to know about Apple products.
Google Knowledge Panel: The knowledge panel on Google appears above the organic search results and provides additional information about a displayed website.
Google Local Listings: Google local listings help businesses get found online. When someone types in their location, they’ll see a list of nearby businesses.
Google Manual Action Penalty: A manual penalty occurs when Google detects something suspicious on your website. This penalty could include spammy links, duplicate content, or low-quality content.
Google My Business Listings: Google My Business listings allowed you to create a listing for your business on Google Maps. GMB is discontinued, but business profiles will still exist as part of Google Maps.
Google News: Google news allows you to see articles from around the web relevant to your search term.
Google Panda: Google panda is an algorithm update that focuses on quality content. Sites with poor content may lose traffic and rankings due to the update.
Google Penalty: If you have been penalized by Google, it means that one or more of your sites has received a manual action from Google. These actions can range from warnings to the removal of your entire site.
Google Penguin: Google penguin is an algorithm update that targets link-building practices. Websites built using unnatural link schemes may receive a warning or even an entire site ban.
Google Places: Google Places is a free service that lets people add reviews, photos, and maps to their business locations.
Google Rich Snippets: Google rich snippets are similar to Facebook likes and Twitter followers, but they’re more specific. They show up when users search for a particular keyword or phrase.
Google Sandbox: The sandbox is a testing area within Google’s search engine. It allows web admins to test different variations of their websites without affecting rankings. Many new websites are said to be “in the sandbox” for some time before they rank on the SERP.
Google Safe Browsing: Google safe browsing is a way for Google to warn you about potentially dangerous websites.
Google Search Console: (GSC) Google search console is a tool that gives you insight into how Google sees your website. You can use GSC to diagnose issues with your SEO strategy.
Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines: These guidelines explain how Google measures quality for its search results.
Google Site Speed: Google site speed is a score that measures how quickly your website loads. It also includes other factors such as page size, number of redirects, and server response time.
Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a feature that suggests relevant search queries based on previous ones entered.
Google Trends: Google trends give you data on how often certain words are searched for.
Google Webmaster Tools: Google webmaster tools are designed to make it easier for web admins to manage their sites. Read more about Google Webmaster guidelines.
Google XML Sitemaps: Google XML sitemap is a file format used to describe URLs for use with Google Search Console.
Googlebot: Googlebot is the name given to the crawler that runs through all websites.
Grey-hat SEO: Grey hat SEO refers to techniques that can improve your ranking while remaining ethical. Some grey hat methods include link building, content creation, social media optimization, etc.
Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to build links back to your site. By writing an article for another site, you can drive traffic back to your site.
H1 Tag: H1 tags are HTML heading tags that appear at the top of a page.
Header tags: Header tags are used to define the structure of a webpage.
Holistic SEO: Holistic SEO is optimizing your entire website instead of just individual pages. This optimization strategy includes having a clear call to action, using keywords throughout the copy, etc.
Hreflang: A hreflang tag tells Google which language versions of your website should appear in search results.
HTML5: HTML 5 is the latest version of HTML. If you want to learn more about HTML5, check out our guide here.
HTTP Status Codes: HTTP status codes are messages sent by servers to indicate what response has been received from a client.
Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks are text links that allow readers to jump from one place to another.
Image Alt Tags: Image alt tags are tags that provide alternative text for an image.
Inbound Link: An Inbound link is a link pointing towards a page related to the page that contains the link.
Indexability: Indexability is the ability of search engines to crawl and index every part of a website.Informational Query: Informational Queries are not directly tied to products or services. They can be anything from “how do I get married” to “what is the best sports team?”
Internal Links: Internal links point to other pages within the same domain.
Intertextual Link: Intertextual links are links between two pieces of text. For example, if you have a list of items on a page, you could also add a link to a definition of that item.
Interstitial Ad: An interstitial ad is a form of advertising where there is no direct connection between the advertiser and the end-user. The ads usually take up space on the screen until users click on them.
Javascript: Javascript is a scripting language that allows developers to create dynamic web pages. It is commonly used to create animations and interactivity.
Keyword Cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization occurs when a website uses too many different focus keywords on various pages rather than optimizing for a single page to rank for that keyword.
Keyword Density: Keyword density is the number of times a keyword appears on a page relative to the total amount of words on the page.
Keyword Difficulty: Keyword difficulty measures how difficult it will be to find a specific word on a page.
Keyword Stemming: Keyword stemming is a process of removing common endings from a keyword such as “accounting” to make it easier for people to find.
Keywords: Keywords are the words and phrases that help people find your website. You can use them in titles, meta descriptions, headlines, body copy, and even image names.
Lazy Loading: Lazy loading is a technique in which images are loaded asynchronously so that the user doesn’t see an empty spot while waiting for the image to load.
Link Bait: Link bait is any type of content designed specifically to attract links. The bait includes blog posts, press releases, videos, etc.
Link Building: Link building involves getting backlinks to your site from other websites. These backlinks increase the authority of your site and improve its ranking.
Link Equity: Link equity is the value of all the links pointing to a particular URL.
Link Exchange: A link exchange is a way to get more backlinks by linking to each other’s sites.
Link Farm: A link farm is a group of websites with similar content linked together. Each site has a large number of backlinks to the others.
Link Popularity: Link popularity is the number of other sites linking to your site.
Link Profile: A link profile is a collection of information about a website’s backlinks quality.
Link Reputation: Link reputation is a measure of how trustworthy a particular link is based on the site’s reputation that it points to.
Link Spam: XML Sorted List: An XML sorted list is similar to an XML sitemap but includes additional information such as dates and descriptions.
Link Reclamation: Reclaiming links is a strategy that involves contacting web admins who may have previously removed their links to your site or added spammy links.
Link Rot: Link rot refers to a situation where one or more links go dead. If you notice this happening, you should contact the owner of the dead link and ask if they would like to add it again.
Link Scheme: Link schemes use multiple domains to point to a single IP address.
Link Spam: Linkspam is the practice of adding lots of links to a website without having a legitimate reason for doing so.
Link Velocity: The velocity of links refers to the rate at which new links are created.
Local Business Schema: Local business schema is a structured data file used by Google to understand local businesses better. It contains essential details such as name, address, phone numbers, hours of operation, and photos.
Local Citation: A citation refers to another website within your own. They are often found within the footer or sidebar of a website.
Long-Tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords are long phrases that are less competitive but still contain valuable information.
LSI Keywords: LSI keywords are keywords that include a keyword phrase along with a related word. For example, “car insurance” might be considered an LSI keyword because it consists of the term “insurance.”
Manual Action: Manual actions are taken when a search engine detects something suspicious about a website. Examples include removing pages from a website or sending out warnings to the website’s administrator.
Meta Data: Metadata is information that describes a webpage. Examples include title tags, alt tags, and keywords.
Meta Description: A meta description summarizes the content found on a particular webpage. This summary is often displayed beneath the title tag in search results.
Mobile-first indexing: Mobile-first indexing is a process whereby mobile optimization comes first before desktop optimization.
Mobile Friendliness: Mobile-friendliness refers to the ability of a website to work well on mobile devices. Several factors affect this, including the size of the font, color contrast, and whether or not the website works with touch screens.
Mobile Optimized Website: A website optimized for mobile devices.
Mobile Search: Mobile search is the process of searching using a mobile device.
Moz Bar: Moz bar is a free tool that helps you analyze your website’s performance. You can use it to track rankings, traffic sources, and more.
Natural Link: Natural links are links that come from other websites. These types of links are usually very beneficial to SEO efforts.
Navigational query: A navigational query is a search query on a website that directs users to a specific page.
Negative SEO: Negative SEO is the act of trying to harm a competitor’s reputation online. It could happen accidentally or intentionally.
Nofollow: Nofollow is a way to tell Google not to follow a link. If you want to avoid having your blog linked to spam blogs, you should use nofollow.
On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is any optimization that happens on a page itself. It includes making sure your links are working correctly, ensuring your headings have alt tags, and ensuring all your images have descriptive file names.
Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO is anything outside of a website that affects how a site ranks in search engines. Off-page SEO tactics include backlinks, social media engagement, press releases, etc.
Open Graph Protocol: The Open Graph protocol allows you to add specific metadata to your web pages so they will show up in Facebook’s news feed.
Organic Search Results: Organic search results are returned by a search engine without paid inclusion. They’re also known as natural search results.
Orphan Page: An orphan page is a page with no links: external or internal
Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is simply visitors who arrive at a website naturally. It may mean people are typing in a URL into their browser, clicking a bookmark, or following a hyperlink.
Outbound Links: Outbound links are links that point away from your website. These types of links help increase your domain authority.
Overly Optimized Pages: Overly optimized pages contain too many keyword phrases. While there is nothing wrong with optimizing a page, it is crucial to keep it balanced. Too much emphasis on one area can lead to a poor user experience.
Page Speed: Page speed indicates how quickly a webpage loads. It is measured in milliseconds.
PageRank: PageRank is a measurement used in the past by Google to determine a ranking score of a page.
Paid Links: Paid links are backlinks that you acquire through payment rather than natural selection.
Pay Per Click: Pay per click means paying each time someone clicks on one of your ads. PPC ads are typically placed at the top of search results.
People Also Ask (PAA): People also ask is a feature provided by Google that lets you see what questions other people have asked about a keyword or topic.
Permalink: The permalink is the permanent URL associated with a post. Post Title: The post title is what shows up in search results. Make sure it accurately describes the article.
Pogo-sticking: Pogo-sticking refers to a user hitting the back button after clicking through to a page displayed on the SERP. They didn’t find what they wanted and bounced back to the results page. It is harmful to SEO.
Pre-Optimization: Pre-optimization is the process of improving your website before you optimize it. Things like fixing broken links, adding new content, and updating outdated pages will improve your overall site performance.
Private Blog Network (PBN): A private blog network is a collection of blogs that link to each other. Each blog has a unique address. A PBN is a black hate strategy for gaining backlinks.
RankBrain: Rankbrain is Google’s artificial intelligence system designed to understand natural language queries. It uses machine learning to determine which sites are most likely to be useful based on how users type their queries.
Reciprocal Link: Reciprocal linking occurs when two websites link to each other. It was a strategy many websites benefited from before Google’s algorithm penalized this overused practice. It’s better to obtain a one-way link rather than linking to each other.
Redirects: Redirects occur when a web admin moves a page from one location to another.
Related Searches: Related searches are those that appear alongside a search result. For example, if you searched “best laptop,” then related searches might include “laptop” and “computer.”
Resource Pages: Resource pages provide information about a particular subject. These types of pages are usually found within directories.
Rich Snippet: Rich snippets are HTML elements that display additional details about a piece of data. For example, a recipe can show ingredients, cooking instructions, nutritional info, etc.
Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a text file used to specify which parts of a website are excluded from being crawled by web robots.
Schema Markup: Schema markup is a unique set of HTML elements that allow webmasters to add structured data about their content. For example, schema markup allows you to include product reviews on your eCommerce store.
Search Algorithm: The search algorithm is the series of steps Google takes to find relevant results for a given query.
Search Console: The search console is a section of Google Webmaster Tools that lets you monitor your website’s performance across multiple platforms.
Search Intent: Search intent is why someone entered a keyword into Google in the first place. If you’re trying to sell shoes, but your top organic listing is for dog food, then you know you have an issue with your keywords.
Search query: A search query is the phrase typed into Google or any other search engine.
Search Result Page: A search result page is where Google displays the search results for a specific query.
Search Volume: Search volume refers to the number of people who perform a specific search. Higher volumes mean that more potential customers are searching for your products.
Secondary Keywords: Secondary keywords are words that help describe your primary keyword. They should not be as competitive as your primary keyword.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): SSL encrypts all traffic between your browser and the server, so it’s safe and private.
Seed Keywords: Seed keywords are the initial list of terms you want to rank for. You’ll use these terms to attract traffic to your site.
SEO: SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of optimizing a webpage, so it ranks higher in search engines like Google.
SEO Audit: An SEO audit is a detailed analysis of elements on and off your pages to improve SEO.
SEO Silo: SEO silos are related content on a website that links back and forth to each other.
Search Engine Results Page: SERP stands for search engine results page. It’s the page that appears after a user performs a search.
SERP: Short for search engine results page.
SERP Features: SERP features are the different ways that Google displays its search results.
Server Side Include: The server-side lets you embed code on your site without creating a separate page.
Short-tail Keywords: Short-tail keywords are phrases that contain 2-3 words.
Sitelinks: Sitelinks are hyperlinks to pages under specific Google listings on the SERP to help users navigate the website. Google adds these based on its algorithms.
Site Map: Site maps help visitors navigate around your site. They’re beneficial if you have lots of different sections.
Site Speed Score: Site speed score measures how quickly a visitor’s browser loads a webpage. A higher number indicates faster load times.
Sitewide Link: A sitewide link links to every page on your website, such as a link in the footer menu.
Social Signals: Social signals are metrics that measure how popular your content is online. Popularity is calculated by likes, shares, comments, retweets, and other social activities.
Spam: Spam is defined as unsolicited commercial email. Many people consider spam to be anything that isn’t directly related to a business’s products or services.
Sponsored Link Attribute: Sponsored link attributes include whether or not a link has been paid for, what type of ad was used to pay for the link, and how many impressions were generated.
Static Content: Static content includes images, videos, PDFs, and other types of files that don’t change often.
Structured Data Markup: Structured data markup is a way to mark up specific pieces of content on a website so they’ll rank more highly in search engines.
Subdirectory: Subdirectories are folders inside of a directory. You can use subdirectories to organize your website’s structure.
Subdomain: Subdomains are domains within a domain name. For example, www.example.com/blog is a subdomain of example.com.
Taxonomy SEO: Taxonomy SEO refers to organizing content into categories. The Taxonomy helps search engines understand what kind of information you offer.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO is about making sure that your website’s technical aspects work correctly.
Text-to-HTML Ratio: Text-to-HTML ratio is the percentage of visible text a page has versus its HTML code
TF-IDF: TF-IDF stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency. It’s an algorithm that ranks websites based on how relevant their content is to a given keyword.
Thin Content: Thin content is any content that doesn’t provide enough value to make it worth reading.
Title Tag: The title tag is the primary piece of information shown when people visit your site. Make sure it contains keywords related to your content.
Top-Level Domain (TLD): Top-level domains are extensions to.com,.org, etc. TLDs are essential because they tell Google which country the domain belongs to.
Topic Cluster: A topic cluster is content that is directly related to each other. It normally would include a pillar post (hub), and many related subtopic articles (spokes). The pages link back to the pillar post as well as to each other where appropriate.
Tracking Code: Tracking codes are snippets of JavaScript that allow you to track specific actions on your website.
Transactional Query: Transactional queries are questions that require answers from customers. Examples include “How much does shipping cost?” or “What is my order total?”.
Transport Layer Security (TLS): Transport layer security is encryption at the transport layer. TLS encrypts traffic between a web server and a client.
TrustRank: Google TrustRank combats webspam for the search engines. TrustRank measures trust signals.
User-generated content (UGC): User-generated content is created by users themselves. It could be reviews, articles, photos, or anything else.
UGC Link Attribute: UGC links attribute determines if a link comes from user-generated content. If it does, it will have a different URL than regular links.
Unnatural Links: Unnatural links occur when someone uses backlinks to manipulate rankings.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator is a string of characters that identifies an address on the Internet. When you enter a URL into a browser, it takes you to the corresponding webpage.
URL Rating: URL rating is a metric that indicates how well optimized a page is. It shows how well the page fits with the rest of the web.
URL Redirect: URL redirects are used to move pages between two URLs without losing any original content.
URL Rewrite: URL rewrite allows you to easily create new URLs without manually editing every page on your site.
URL Slug: A URL slug is a short version of a long URL. They’re often used in blog posts and other types of content where the full URL would take up too much space.
User Experience: Good user experiences make websites easier to use and more enjoyable for visitors. User experience is the combination of aesthetics and usability that makes something appealing.
Vanity URL: Vanity URLs are short, memorable URLs that aren’t tied to a particular product or service. They’re also known as permalink URLs.
Vertical Search: Vertical search is searching within a specific category or subcategory. For example, if you want to find all the products in the electronics section, you’d type in “electronics” instead of just typing in “products”.
Visible Content: Visible content is the amount of text on a page
Website Architecture: Website architecture is the overall structure of a website. A good website architecture allows you to add new features and maintain existing ones easily.
Visible URL: Visible URLs are the URLs that appear in the address bar of a web browser. If someone clicks on a visible URL, they will see the full path to the page.
Voice Search: Voice search is a way to interact with computers using only voice commands. Voice search can be done through mobile apps like Siri or Alexa or desktop software such as Microsoft‘s Cortana.
Web 2.0: Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the World Wide Web. It was characterized by social networking, blogging, wikis, mashups, video sharing, podcasting, RSS feeds, photo sharing, online forums, and other features.
Website Architecture: Website architecture is the structure of a website. It includes things like navigation menus, breadcrumbs, and internal linking.
Website Design: Website design is the art of creating a visually pleasing website. The goal is to attract people who visit your website and keep them there.
Website Speed: Website speed is the time it takes for a visitor to load a page. Slow loading times result in poor user experience and lower conversion rates.
Website Speed Optimization: Website speed optimization is the practice of making changes to your website, so it loads faster.
Webspam: Webspam is a term used to describe low-quality websites that have been created solely to gain traffic from Google.
Website Authority: The degree to which a website is viewed as an authority in a particular topic.
Website Breadcrumb Navigation: Website breadcrumb navigation is when the links at the top of a website lead users back to previous website sections.
Website Crawl: A website crawl is performed by a search engine spider to index all the pages on a website.
Website Conversion Rate: Website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who convert into customers.
Website Copywriting: Website copywriting is writing content for a website focused on conversion.
Website Crawler: A website crawler is a program that indexes websites automatically.
Website Developer: A website developer is responsible for building and maintaining a website.
White Hat SEO: White hat SEO is simply ethical SEO practice.
Whitespace: Whitespace is a space on a page. The purpose of whitespace is to give a clean look to a page.
X-Robots Tag: An X-robots tag is a meta tag added to a webpage that tells search engines not to index the webpage.
Yahoo! Directory: Yahoo! Directory is a directory of websites maintained by Yahoo!. It contains information about websites, including their popularity, age, indexed pages, etc.
YMYL Pages: YMYL stands for “Your Money & Your Life.” These are pages that Google believes an expert should write based on how the topical advice can be risky for the user.
YouTube SEO: YouTube SEO is optimizing videos for search engines.
XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is a list of URLs that can be accessed via a single index.xml file. Each item in the list has its unique URL.
XML Sorting: XML sorting is organizing your XML files using categories or subcategories. It helps readers find specific pieces of information quickly.